Lots of folks like dogs. They are, after all, Man's Best Friend, and have been for millennia untold. They protect us, they watch our properties, they look out for our kids, and they are the most faithful of all our animal companions. For much of my life, when I've ever heard anyone repeat the old saw that "you can't buy love," I reply, "Obviously you've never had a puppy." I don't have a dog now, but I had a dog in a million, an English Springer Spaniel, a wonderful, sweet-natured animal, a great gun dog, who shared my life for almost 18 years, until her passing in 1999 - and I still think of her often. She would have loved Alaska.
Those of us who love our dogs generally treat them well - sometimes extremely well - and we hate to see dogs, anyone's dogs, abused or neglected. But if you're reading these words, here at RedState, it's a safe bet that you love the Constitution as well, and that's where we get into a political oddity: The neglect of dogs in Los Angeles' Skid Row is causing the federal government to have to step in where they really have no constitutional authority to do so.
It's all because of neglect on the part of the municipal government. My friend and colleague Jennifer Oliver O'Connell has done some great reporting on how the homeless population down there is neglecting and abusing the dogs who are found in their enclaves:
Read More: Watch: LA Mayor Bass' Complicity in the Abuse, Trafficking and Death of Dogs on Skid Row Exposed
There is hope for these pooches; the problem is, according to a recent column from The Federalist's Chris Bray, it's coming from a quarter that really shouldn't be involved.
Personal note to Democrats: If you hate Donald Trump and really believe that he yearns to rule as an authoritarian, stop voting for dismal failures like Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom. They’re creating power vacuums with enormous zones of unchecked failure, and those vacuums are being filled.
The examples are everywhere, but start here: In Los Angeles, a long-running animal abuse crisis has been going unaddressed, and is getting steadily worse. An animal rescue activist named Joey Tuccio documents the problem as he tries to solve it, posting an endless flood of videos of caged and wounded dogs dying in homeless encampments.
Skid Row is a disaster, for people and for animals, and I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Homeless drug addicts breed pit bulls in encampments as a street business, and do it about as carefully as you’d expect in a place called Skid Row. Tuccio finds dogs being bred with untreated broken bones, being tossed into the gutter to bleed to death, starving to death, and on and on. It’s a parade of horrors in a place of endless degradation.
That's bad enough in and of itself. These kinds of things should properly be handled by the city, as in urban environments, it's normally the municipal government that handles animal control and cruelty issues, and these are certainly cruelty issues. But the city isn't doing anything, any more than they are doing anything to clean up the huge, festering homeless enclaves that are scattered around the City of Angels. One might think the state of California would step in, but the impeccably coiffed Governor Newsom is apparently too busy burnishing his presidential ambitions.
So now the federal government is stepping in.
But someone has finally taken action. Last year, the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles announced the formation of an animal abuse task force: “Acting United States Attorney Bill Essayli today announced the creation of a federal animal abuse task force aimed at prosecuting violations of the federal Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture (PACT) Act signed into law by President Trump in 2019.”
That task force is making arrests. This week, federal prosecutors charged a 53-year-old man in the suburban community of Hacienda Heights with many felonies after they allegedly caught him breeding pit bulls for dog fights. Federal agents serving a search warrant found “an emaciated pit bull that was bleeding and chained to a cable in the yard; a second pit bull with scars in a bloody caged area; five dog treadmills; a rope with a scale for weighing dogs; and a skin stapler and syringes.” The FBI’s Los Angeles office posted on social media about its role in the arrests.
That's great. I mean, it's great that this mess is being cleaned up - and at least the part that involves animal cruelty. The human cruelty, allowing people to live, shoot up, and die on the sidewalks, is still left unaddressed. But why would it take a United States Attorney to get this done?
This is great news, and it’s also completely insane. It means that someone is finally bothering to address an obvious, serious, and long-neglected problem. But it also means that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is searching for “dog treadmills,” doing the role of local animal control officers, because blue states do everything poorly. A problem that cries out for simple local action is being address (sic) by the central government. Washington, D.C., is in charge of making sure that dogs in Los Angeles aren’t mistreated.
That last sentence, that's the bad part. Federalism is being torn asunder on this issue. There is no constitutional power given to any branch of the federal government to address local animal control issues. The 10th Amendment, read by anyone with a 3rd-grade reading comprehension level, makes it very plain that, absent any enumerated power in the Constitution, then Washington is prohibited from taking any action. Granted, Congress has been ignoring the 10th Amendment since about 1860, and most presidential administrations haven't done all that well, either. But what's to do in this case? It's not just the dogs. It's the enclaves where their abusers are nested. The cities infested with these enclaves are doing nothing. The blue states where the enclaves spread and grow are doing nothing.
Nature abhors a vacuum. But then again, we have the Constitution, which we are supposed to respect as the prime law of the land. Meanwhile, dogs, creatures the majority of us love, are dying horribly.
At what point do we set aside the founding principle of federalism? Are we all going to the dogs?
